Israeli Doctor Exposes Nazi Abortion Program

An Israeli doctor has recently published an account of the Nazi use of abortion, euthanasia, and sterilization to eliminate groups they deemed “inferior stock”, especially Jewish and Slavic people.

Dr. Tessa Chelouche writes that “Abortion was used as a weapon of mass destruction in Eastern Europe,” where “it has been estimated that tens of thousands of Polish and Russian women were compelled to abort not because of health reasons, but because of Nazi dogma.” She goes on to quote Hitler’s 1942 policy statement on the application of abortion to Slavic people, which is chillingly similar to modern Planned Parenthood propaganda:

“In view of the large families of the Slav native population, it could only suit us if girls and women there had as many abortions as possible. We are not interested in seeing the non-German population multiply…We must use every means to instill in the population the idea that it is harmful to have several children, the expenses that they cause and the dangerous effect on woman’s health… It will be necessary to open special institutions for abortions and doctors must be able to help out there in case there is any question of this being a breach of their professional ethics.”

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, expressed a similar objective about eliminating US colored people in a letter she wrote only months after Hitler’s invasion of Poland: “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Today, Planned Parenthood and other international promoters of abortion, sterilization, and contraception, often claim that the availability of such services is a “health issue” and is necessary to fight poverty, echoing Hitler’s slogans.

The article, “Doctors, Pregnancy, Childbirth and Abortion during the Third Reich,” which appeared in the March issue of the Israel Medical Association Journal, shows that Hitler facilitated and promoted abortion and sterilization for “inferior genetic stock”, while simultaneously practicing “positive eugenics” by prohibiting most abortions and sterilizations of “Aryan” German women. This practice reflected the same reasoning behind Margaret Sanger’s famous slogan “more from the fit, less from the unfit”.

In 1942 and 1943, the Nazis implemented mandatory abortion programs in some ghettos. “The punishment for giving birth and for delivering the infant was death for the whole family and for the Jewish doctor or midwife,” writes Chelouche. In the concentration camps, however, “pregnant women were usually sent to their immediate deaths upon arrival just because they were pregnant.”

Chelouche also notes that the German sterilization program easily led to a program of mass murder of unwanted groups. “During the five and a half years preceding the outbreak of the Second World War, about 320,000 German persons with ‘lives unworthy of life’ were sterilized under the terms of the sterilization law,” she writes.

“The victims of this sterilization program were asylum inmates, ethnic majorities, servants, prostitutes, unmarried mothers, unskilled workers and others. This sterilization campaign was a direct prelude to mass murder: the prohibition against bearing ‘unworthy children’ was expanded into the ‘euthanasia’ programs, beginning with the murder of some 5,000 children, and then into the infamous T4 ‘euthanasia’ program in which some 350,000 German adults were killed under the disguise of euthanasia.”

Chelouche concludes with a profound question: “Who can confront the Holocaust and not be put on alert to evaluate scientific paradigms and the implications for public policy that flow from them, so that what we, as medical professionals and as human beings, want and identify as good, will be for the sake of respecting and saving human life? They too asked and answered the question: who shall live and who shall die? Then and now the subject at hand is killing, letting die, helping to die, and using the dead. Then and now the goal is to produce healthier human beings.”

Dr. Tessa Chelouche is a physician with Clalit Health Services, in the Shomron District in Israel, and is affiliated with the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel.